The Dark Lord: H.P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, and the Typhonian Tradition in Magic - Peter Levenda 2013
The Necronomicon Gnosis
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs ... were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. This secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild “Witches' Sabbaths” in lonely woods and atop distant hills or Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en ...
—H. P. Lovecraft128
The deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon ...
—H. P. Lovecraft129
HIDEOUS CULT, NOCTURNAL WORSHIPPERS, revolting fertility rites ... double meanings. It is this last that gives us pause because it so eloquently reveals both Lovecraft's own timidity when it comes to sexuality and religion as well as the basis for the Thelemic, Necro-nomicon and Egyptian currents upon which Grant expounds throughout all nine volumes of his Typhonian Trilogies.
Fertility rites.
One could make the case that Tantra is essentially the survival of some more ancient fertility cult operative throughout the sub-continent, perhaps before the Aryan invasions, and that our concepts of lingam and yoni, amrita, and Shiva and Shakti all derive from this practice “of immemorial antiquity.” After all, some Tantric practitioners do indeed meet “nocturnally” in remote places to carry out their “fertility rites.”
It is this type of public relations effort, carried out not only by Lovecraft but by the Western media in general, that made Tantra and its associated beliefs and practices seem so exotic and forbidden, pretty much substantiating Edward Said's insistence that virtually all Western approaches to Asia were racist and condescending.
However, in the case of Tantra in particular it was not only the white colonialist class that was appalled by these practices but members of the established Brahmin classes of India as well. Nothing disturbs a member of the social and religious elite quite so much as discovering groups of men and women, together, at night, in a cremation ground, worshipping the gods and possibly even having sex in a ritual setting. The very concept would make a Vedic (and a Catholic) priest's head explode. (There is also, of course, the implied threat to the social order and specifically to the orthodox priesthood represented by independent religious practitioners communicating directly with the gods in an unapproved manner.)
Sexuality is such a central feature of human life everywhere on the planet that to describe any social group or organization that is in any way non-traditional or antinomian is to suggest that it's sexual practices are also bizarre, or strange, or unorthodox. It would be difficult to make the case for an American satanic organization, for instance, that practiced the Black Mass as the core ritual of their faith—and whose members were all celibate (by choice or by doctrine) or scrupulously faithful to their spouses. We associate anti-religions with liberation,130 because we identify religion with restraint, with rules, with doctrines involving the human passions and the attempt to corral them into socially-acceptable channels. Thus any anti-church worth its salt would incorporate sexual liberation or even sexual “depravity” as part of its repertoire.
The Necronomicon Sigil is a compsite of the three signs of ARRA (the Sign of our Race), AGGA (the Elder Sign), and BANDAR (the Sigil of the Watcher).
But Lovecraft went a step further. Since he did not identify any of the existing religions and their gods as the “hideous cults” of which he writes (except from a few choice asides to the Yezidi in the short story “The Horror at Red Hook”), he invented another religious entity entirely. He wanted a cult that was older than anything on earth, older than any historically-verifiable religion, something so old that it would have appeared ancient to the pre-dynastic Egyptians and the Sumerians (arguably the oldest civilization on record). It would be the Ur-cult, the original religion, and its origins would be as mysterious and murky as the origins of the human race itself: the stars.
At the same time, Lovecraft understood that the occult rituals of the West and the East—in particular ceremonial magic for the former and shamanism for the latter—could be employed as means of making contact with these forces: forces that he claimed were still interested in returning to the earth, but who had been prevented from doing so because of certain spells that had been cast that closed the Gate between this world and theirs, and which kept their chief priest—the dread Cthulhu—”dead but dreaming” in his sunken city of R'lyeh ... waiting for the moment when “the stars are right” and his devotees on earth chant the right chants and raise him from his grave to invoke the Old Ones once more. The satanic cults of the world—the devil-worshipping, secretive, murderous, or otherwise unorthodox and antinomian—were survivals of this original cult and were keeping its blasphemous memory alive.
Lovecraft's theme is not as internally consistent as the above paragraph would suggest. Lovecraft himself tinkered with it in his stories, and other contributors added to the legends in their own tales, creating what has been called the Cthulhu Mythos. We will not attempt to delineate all the moving parts of the Mythos here, but only focus on those elements that concern what Grant calls the Necronomicon Mythos, which he sees as one manifestation of the underground current that supplies the fuel for Thelema. This is the most contentious aspect of the Thelema gestalt—for many members of the OTO and allied groups are vehemently opposed to Grant's concept of Thelema, and especially to any addition of elements from the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, which they feel are “fictional” and “imaginary” and thus have no place in their religion. (Atheists will find this attitude rather ironic, no doubt.)
Grant's response to this has been to emphasize the importance of the artistic in religion, and especially in Thelema. There were artists, writers, musicians, dancers, and actors surrounding Crowley for most of his life, becoming involved in Thelema to greater or lesser degrees and contributing to the culture of his movement. Imagination, creativity, and vision are essential aspects of the artistic arsenal, which are elements of the magical environment as well. Inasmuch as Thelema's origins are patently magical, the close association of art and Thelema cannot be denied. Crowley considered himself to be the greatest living poet in the world, among other things. He also painted, organized theatrical troupes such as the Ragged Ragtime Girls, and conducted the Rites of Eleusis as public performance in a theater, the last an indication that he understood the role of ritual as drama and of drama as ritual. He also wrote short stories and novels, such as the revealing Moonchild, which incorporates elements of the Golden Dawn, the A
A, ceremonial magic in general, Asian religions, etc. all wrapped up in a Thelemic context but with allusions to world events (thus embroidering upon the paranoid fantasy that all world events are orchestrated by a secret society of satanic magicians). Moonchild is a roman-a-clef, with many of Crowley's friends and enemies portrayed in ways that would amuse only Crowley and anyone else in on the joke. But the occult and magical aspects of Moonchild are the most valuable aspect of the novel. Crowley used the novel as a medium for transmitting occult information. Why, then, would we deny Lovecraft the same capability if not the intention?
Lovecraft's understanding was quite similar. His most influential work, the short story “The Call of Cthulhu,” is specific in its depiction of artists as the first people on the planet to become aware that something cosmic was taking place involving the race from the stars and the sinister, slumbering high priest, Cthulhu. Some of this awareness is communicated through dreams, and dream control is a key element of the Grant technique.
Take for example these quotes first from Lovecraft and then from Grant:
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.... These responses from esthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium.... and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible towards the last.131
Certain fugitive elements appear occasionally in the works of poets, painters, mystics, and occultists which may be regarded as genuine magical manifestations in that they demonstrate the power and ability of the artist to evoke elements of an extradimensional and alien universe that may be captured only by the most sensitive and delicately adjusted antennae of human consciousness.132
The sculptor referred to in the first quotation is young Wilcox, who has been having strange dreams and visions the result of which is art that seems to suggest the existence of alien beings. It is the sculpture left behind by Wilcox that instigates the investigation of the Cthulhu Cult, a search that ranges from Providence, Rhode Island to New Orleans, Louisiana to the South Pacific—with side trips to parts of Asia. At the same time that Wilcox is having his unearthly experience artists from around the world are reporting the same type of experience, sometimes with deadly results as some go insane, or kill themselves.
In the second quotation, Grant shows that he is agreeing with Lovecraft's analysis and explains the phenomenon as representing “genuine magical manifestations.” This is a key statement, one that Grant uses to justify his use of the Lovecraft material in his Typhonian mythos. One either agrees at this point, or does not. If one disagrees with Grant, then the rest of the Typhonian material makes no sense at all, and can be considered the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic or a visionary artist fallen on hard times ... or hard drugs. But then, if one disagrees with Grant, one is tempted to review all of the Thelemic material in the same light, for Crowley received the Book of the Law under very arcane (if not actually suspicious) circumstances. Crowley insisted that his revelations were true, and so his followers take them as truth while the rest of the world dismisses them as fiction. Lovecraft insisted that his stories were fiction, and so his fans take them as fiction ... even as Grant and his followers believe that the Lovecraft short stories are genuine transmissions of Thelemic knowledge.
It is important to understand that Grant places a great deal of importance on what he calls “dream control” and devotes a chapter to it in his Outer Gateways:
Dream actions are a clue to the magical condition of the subliminal self. ... The dream is all we may know, normally, of the fourth dimension while we are embodied three-dimensionally. But we are not so embodied while dreaming. We are then already a step ahead, even although we are still viewing the scene from another dimension, an inner dimension, which differs from dreamless sleep in that it is not totally formless and void. This extra dimension is the Mauve Zone. Surrealists, futurists, cubists, abstractionists, were groping towards its expression.133
Here we have the connection between dream control, the Mauve Zone (the name Grant gives for the Abyss or for a belt of dark power encircling the Abyss), and the artist, which is basically a description of what was taking place in Lovecraft's story. By “artist” here Grant is not indicating the painter of still-lifes or portraits, of course, but the avant-garde practitioner of Surrealism and the other movements that came out of the first World War. Surrealism in particular is important to the study of magic and esotericism because it used psychology, automatic writing, the Tarot and other forms of “discarded religion” in an effort to create works of art that would act as initiatory powers in their own right, through shocking an audience or causing them to view the world in a way that was not comfortable or “normal.” By juxtaposing unrelated elements in a poem, a drawing, or other artform, a dream-like state was experienced in our dimension as if an urgent message was being received from Grant's Mauve Zone.
Thus Grant was able to see in Lovecraft's stories—particularly those of the Cthulhu Mythos—a message from the stars as important (or, at least, as relevant) as that received by Crowley. Possibly Lovecraft resisted the message because he loathed the messenger: the creepy, hideous beings that Grant calls “Typhonian Teratomas”134: monstrous offspring created by the intercourse between humans and alien forms of life and the source of Lovecraft's vision of “revolting fertility rites of immemorial antiquity.” In stories like “The Dunwich Horror,” Lovecraft suggests the possibility that humans and alien beings could mate and produce children who would then be hideously ugly and possessed of strange abilities. The idea that humans could somehow mate with gods, demons, and other beings is a staple of much European and Middle Eastern religion and legend. The Greek and Roman myths are full of such tales, and in the Babylonian Talmud and in various Kabbalistic and other texts we have references to Lilith, the Queen of the Night, sometimes as the first spouse of Adam and the demons as her children with the evil spirit Samael.135 Most famously in the West, the story of the sons of God and the “daughters of men” (Genesis 6:4) seems to tell a similar story of unholy intercourse between two different beings, one human and one not-quite-human.
Lovecraft was a lover of science and an atheist; he claimed more than once in his voluminous correspondence that his stories were pure fantasy, with no relationship to anything real, but perhaps motivated by his intellectual horror of the vast expanses of space that seem to dwarf all human aspiration and potential. He also had a definite fear and loathing of other races, races he saw as degenerate forms of human life, monstrous throwbacks or deviations along the evolutionary path. While we can regard his native racism with pity or contempt, we can also see beyond it to realize that it is consistent with his fiction. In Lovecraft's tales nothing good can come of the mating of humans with the Old Ones. The genetic anomalies that result would throw the world open to the ravages of these uncaring, oblivious, and insane beings from planets so far from ours that they would be invisible to even the strongest of telescopes.
Mating with the gods, in other words, opens the Gate.
“The thing has gone for ever,” Armitage said. “It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father—and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm of dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills. ...You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”136
In the above quotation from Lovecraft, we learn of the magician Wilbur Whateley and his dark rites conducted on an altar in a circle of standing stones, and the summoning forth of a murderous entity from “some vague abyss,” i.e., analogous to Grant's Mauve Zone. Wilbur and the monster were twins, because their human mother—Lavinia Whateley, “a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of 35”—had mated with a mysterious, unknown supramundane entity, their father. Lavinia's own father was a wizard of some repute, which explains how she came into contact with the alien being in the first place. And Wilbur Whately, her son? He was born on February 2, 1913, the date known as Candlemas to the Christian world and as Imbolc or Oimelc to the pagan world: one of the cross-quarter days that are so important to the pre-Christian calendar, coming as they do halfway between the quarter days (i.e., the solstices and equinoxes that are sacred to the solar cult because they represent stages in the sun's progress through the zodiac). The cross-quarter days are the places “between,” and it is this “inbetweenness” that attracts the attention of both Lovecraft and Grant.
Further, the choice of February 2 is illustrative of another aspect to Lovecraft's work: his deliberate use of symbols. To the pagan, pre-Christian world that day was called Imbolc, an Old Irish word that means “in the belly,” a reference to pregnancy. It is a suggestive date to use for the birthing of a monster, sired by a pre-Christian ancient God or Devil.
As an aside we should note that Lovecraft is always careful to use precise dates in his stories. There is no poetic ambiguity there, no referencing of the month but not the year as one finds in most stories and novels. Lovecraft always insists on specificity in his chronologies, and it is this aspect of his work that makes it so valuable to those looking for connections to real-world events especially as it seems Lovecraft is deliberately trying to tell us something. Because of this characteristic we were able to identify Crowley's fevered writing of some of the Thelemic Holy Books at a time when Lovecraft claimed there were orgiastic rites to Cthulhu taking place in New Orleans ... inspired by an Unholy Book: the Necronomicon.
The month of February, 1913 was an important one in the art world for it signalled the public appearance in New York City of Surrealist works by Marcel Duchamp. Surrealism is singled out by Grant to be one of the artforms most influenced by occult or magical currents. Only a few days earlier, in January of 1913, Kafka would put down the pen on his unfinished novel Amerika forever. But it was during 1913 that Crowley would write the Gnostic Mass, which we have discussed previously, as well as his famous Hymn to Pan.
The previous year was when Theodor Reuss visited Crowley in London and accused him of printing the IXth degree secret of the OTO in his Book of Lies, specifically the chapter devoted to the Star Sapphire ritual. He then admitted Crowley to the IXth degree of the OTO, as mentioned previously, and then Crowley was put in charge of the OTO operations in the British Isles.
So, when “Wilbur Whateley” was born, Crowley was embarking on the game-changing actions that would make him the leader of one of the most famous Western secret societies of the twentieth century. As we have seen above, Crowley believed that the Egyptian gods Horus and Set were “twins”: that they personified the double wand of power, as they represented the union of Lower and Upper Egypt respectively. Horus was the “good” god, and Set was the Evil One. Thus, perhaps Wilbur Whateley was the “good” twin and his brother—the monstrous thing they had to destroy—was the Evil One, the Set to Wilbur's Horus.
While these associations may seem fanciful, we need only remember how definitive were Lovecraft's stories when matched against corresponding dates and events in Thelema. In order to understand the Necronomicon Gnosis it is necessary to grasp some of the essential elements as transcribed by Lovecraft (and those of his circle) and then to “port” them over to Thelemic elements and note their correspondence. If Lovecraft received many of his ideas through his dreams, as he often admitted in writing to friends, then his process was consistent with Grant's dream control theory and practice. What is startling is that the dreams of Lovecraft would so neatly correspond to the inspirations received by Crowley.
They were both dreaming the same dream.
The reader will remember that the frenzied orgy taking place in the swamps outside New Orleans in Lovecraft's “The Call of Cthulhu” occurred on the same day that Crowley was writing several of what would be known as the “Holy Books.” However, there are other coincidences that bear inspection.
For instance, in “The Call of Cthulhu” the young sculptor Wilcox visits Professor George Angell during the period February 28 to April 2, 1925. This is the time when other artists, mediums and sensitives are experiencing similar visions around the world. Lovecraft has selected this period with care, for there was an earthquake on February 28, 1925 that affected the northeastern United States and Canada. This same earthquake is used by Lovecraft as a device that enables a sunken city beneath the waves of the Pacific Ocean to rise to the surface. While the earthquake in question did not occur in the Pacific, it was obviously the inspiration for the earthquake in the story.
It is compelling to realize that this is a phenomenon that actually has occurred and within recent history. The famous earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004, that took more than 200,000 lives in Asia from Indonesia and Thailand to India, also had the effect of raising an entire undersea temple off the eastern coast of India.
This was the fabled Mahabalipuram Temple of the Seven Pagodas, built in the 8th century CE. Only one of the seven “pagodas” had survived into the modern age, the so-called “Shore Temple” believed to be one of the original seven. Just before the tsunami struck, local residents saw the ocean pull away from the coastline as if being inhaled by something far out to sea. As the ocean rolled away, the sunken temple complex was revealed, showing the missing pagodas, only to be swallowed again when the roiling sea water returned. It was as if the sunken city of R'lyeh had materialized out of nowhere as an homage to Lovecraft. That it was an Indian temple seemed to indicate a resonance between the Necronomicon Gnosis and the Tantric interpretation by Kenneth Grant.
The period of general weirdness, insanity and troubled dreams depicted in “The Call of Cthulhu” as beginning with the earthquake of February 28 ends on April 2, 1925 which is the day that an important meeting of the Surrealists took place in Paris, a meeting that would decide how the artistic movement would become politically active, and which produced the Memorandum of the Surrealist Revolution. Lovecraft never refers to this meeting, of course, and it is doubtful whether or not he would have been aware of it at all. However, the bookending of an earthquake on one side and the Surrealist Memorandum on the other is perfectly consistent with Lovecraft's storyline. The shattering effect of the earthquake that shakes the sunken city where Cthulhu lies dead but dreaming, causing him to awaken from his ancient slumber, and the “certain state of fury”137 that informed the Surrealist movement as these avant-garde artists struggled with altered states of consciousness and altered political states ... all of this becomes part of the Love-craftian Zeitgeist. The earthquake awakens Cthulhu, and the artists—the most avant-garde, the most sensitive to occultism, depth psychology, and automatic writing—assemble in a “certain state of fury” to decide how artistic transgression and political transgression can work together to cause the destruction of civilization as they knew it. The dreams of the Surrealists bled over into the dreams of the Communists, and these dreams were seeded by the high priest of the Old Ones who needs social unrest and dislocation to give his followers the space to perform the orgia necessary to open the channels, the Gates, to the Underworld.
Kenneth Grant may be characterized as the analyst interpreting these dreams, not for the sake of the dreamers but for those of us who struggle to understand the dream content and how it may be relevant to a study of magic and religion in the 21st century. Grant reveals how the Lovecraft material expands upon the data received by Crowley with virtually no reference to the Golden Dawn-type atmosphere of the latter. Lovecraft is seeing what Crowley sees, only he sees it from the perspective of an outsider, someone for whom the symbol-set of the fin-de-siecle British secret society has no meaning and provides no context; and for whom the initiatory structure of the Golden Dawn is not available to protect him from the experience. Instead, Lovecraft sees it raw, unfiltered. And that is what frightens him.
The basic features of the Necronomicon Gnosis may be reduced to a few convenient elements. The first is Cthulhu himself.
Lovecraft refers to Cthulhu as the high priest of the Old Ones and thus may not be an Old One himself. At least, he is not one of the ancient Gods but is a priest of those Gods. The physical description of Cthulhu shows that he is not human by any stretch of the imagination, with his octopus-like head replete with tentacles. One is reminded of the Egyptian gods who are often depicted as beings with humanoid bodies but with animal heads. What Lovecraft is implying in his stories is that those are the actual physical characteristics of the gods and not some sophisticated symbolic interpretation. Conversely, we could say that—if applying the Egyptian standards to Lovecraft's Cthulhu—that Cthulhu does not really have an octopus head but that it is Lovecraft's way of implying octopus-like characteristics.
The Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon—i.e., the “Simonomicon”—translates the name Cthulhu as Kutulu: a Sumerian neologism meaning “Man of the Underworld.” He is, according to this interpretation, a psychopomp, a guide to the Other World, to the Mauve Zone. He is a liminal figure standing at the crossroads of this world and the next. The word kutu has a double meaning: it refers not only to the Underworld but to a specific city in ancient Sumer, Cutha or Gudua. The city itself was considered to be the location of an entrance to the Underworld and, as mentioned previously, it was the home city of the Qureish, the tribe to which the Prophet Muhammad belonged and which was in charge of the Ka'aba when it was a pagan shrine to the Moon God, Hubal.
There is a thus a rich vein of symbolism to be mined in the word Cthulhu. As the editor of the Necronomicon, Simon, points out the word may also be a subtle play on the term cthonic, a word used in anthropology and religious studies to mean “underground” or “under the earth” when referencing gods and spirits that are believed to dwell below the surface of the earth. The pronounciation of the word cthonic in the Oxford English Dictionary is precisely “ka-tonic” and may have also given Lovecraft the pun necessary for his famous Miskatonic University: the fictional location where the dreaded Necronomicon itself is kept under lock and key in the rare book room.
At some point in the far distant past the Old Ones were in control of this planet. When they left, Cthulhu remained behind as their lone contact and high priest but he was defeated in some manner and entombed—either beneath the earth or beneath the waves, in the sunken city of R'lyeh—and remains in that state until he can be awakened by his human followers on earth, when the “stars are right.” In his present state he is “dead but dreaming,” like a vampire in the coffin; except a vampire may come alive at the setting of the sun, every day, but Cthulhu can only come alive when the stars are right, i.e., when the constellations themselves are aligned in such a way as to provide a channel for the Old Ones to return. There is assumed to be a sort of ritual mechanism in which human followers of the Old Ones can perform an appropriate ceremony at an appropriate time and this will serve to awaken Cthulhu so he can begin his ritual for summoning the Old Ones back to earth. The right ceremony at the right time opens the Gate between this world and the next.
While it seems melodramatic and outlandish in Lovecraft's stories, this is exactly what the medieval European magicians believed. The timing of the ritual was extremely important in order for the angels and demons to be properly evoked. In Grant's own system, timing is just as important for the sexually-based rituals of his modified Tantra. The kalas—a word that suggests the Sanskrit term for “time” as in Kalacakra or “Wheel of Time”—are essences secreted by a woman on different days of her menstrual cycle. It was most likely the lunar phases in the heavens and the menstrual cycle on earth that first suggested the measurement of time and periodicity to pre-historic civilizations. The alignment of the lunar cycle with the menstrual cycle is an essential element of Grant's Tantra; alignments of the planetary cycles are themselves essential to the successful practice of ceremonial magic.
To Lovecraft, the proper alignment of the stars is never described fully. It is a secret science, known only to the worshippers of Cthulhu and the Old Ones. They alone possess the knowledge of how the stars would appear when they were “right.” Again, there is precedence in Western and Asian astrology.
To most people in the West, astrology is essentially solar astrology. It is based on the passage of the Sun through the zodiacal belt. In India, however, astrology is sidereal: it is based on the actual positions of the planets when viewed against the stars of the zodiac rather than on a constant (solar) calendar date. Thus, people who believe themselves to be a Libran in the West may very well discover to their shock that in India they are said to be Virgoans. This is due to the precession of the equinoxes that was mentioned previously. Thus, when the “stars are right” in Europe they may not be right in India.
Add to this confusion the plethora of indigenous calendars around the world, none of which are exact matches for the others, and you have time-keeping systems that are unique to each culture. Java, for instance, has at least five calendars in use. Their diviners use all five in determining personal characteristics of the newborn, the best days for starting an enterprise, planting crops, etc.
The European magicians had complex tables showing the rulership of each day and each hour within the day, rulerships that changed with the day of the week. Previous to the rather arbitrary assigment of planets to days and hours, however, were the Babylonian systems of astrology that included not only planets and zodiacal constellations but also a whole host of fixed stars as well as comets and other astronomical phenomena. The Babylonian astrologers actually watched the heavens on a constant, unending basis (something which many of our contemporary astrologers would be uinin-terested or incapable of doing, spoiled as they are by computerized calculations and real-time simulations of the heavens). They did not view the astral positions as purely symbolic but kept an eye on the skies alert to any new message, any new prediction. Thus, an Ur-cult such as the one we have been suggesting would use an “astrology” that was rather more astronomy than astrology, although partaking of elements of each.
That this Ur-astrology is also concerned with biological functions is one of the missing links in the Lovecraftian ouevre. He hints at it, talks around it with his references to “orgies” and his discussion of poor Lavinia Whately and her demonic offspring. When the stars are right, it's not only the time when Cthulhu can be roused from his subterranean slumber but it's also the time when 35-year-old albino women can be impregnated by invisible alien monsters as long as the correct rituals are performed. An essential aspect of the Cthulhu Mythos is that a knowledeable cult of experienced sorcerers are indispensable to the opening (and especially the closing) of the Gate. Lavinia did not conceive a monstrous creature by accident, after some adolescent fumbling in a hayloft at the Whateley farm. She conceived during a ritual that enabled her father, old Wizard Whateley, to charge the essences (the kalas) appropriately so that—as the Gate opened at the proper time—Lavinia's ovum would have been subtly altered to enable the alien seed to take root.138
None of this is described as such in “The Dunwich Horror,” of course. It takes a little reading between the lines. Knowing what we know now of how these Typhonian Teratomas are created it is a simple task to go back and re-read Lovecraft with greater understanding of the process and of what was said and most important what was not said or described, but implied. That human sexuality is a means of breaching the boundaries between this world and the next is a staple of Tantra. It was virtually unknown in the West until comparatively recently with the publication of some translated Tantric texts in the nineteenth century. But this was common knowledge to the cultists around Cthulhu in Lovecraft's stories.
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror”
It was Yog-Sothoth who impregnated Lavinia Whateley, who then gave birth to Wilbur Whateley and his monstrous, unnamed twin brother. Yog-Sothoth as the Gate is thus perfectly understandable in the context we have been examining. It is through this unnatural intercourse and its subsequent conception that a Gate has been opened between this world and the next, and a Magical Child created who lives in both.
Grant illuminates this concept when he writes of the assumption of god-forms, a practice that is essential to Thelemic ritual in general. His approach also helps us to understand the nature of Cthulhu, the octopus-headed beast of the statue we discover in “The Call of Cthulhu.”
He writes:
The magical theories which underlie the formula of the assumption of god-forms are of vital importance to an understanding of Crowley's later refinement and rehabilitation of them. The masquerading as animal-headed deities ... was done with intent to assimilate the superhuman powers possessed by certain animals.
This formula, which was used by sorcerers of the ancient world, had a profound effect upon the psychology of the operator. Because man evolved from the beasts, he possesses—deeply buried in his subconscious—the memories of superhuman powers he once possessed. ... Any required atavism could be evoked by assumption of the appropriate god-form. ... Crowley interprets the formula as a magical unification of larval consciousness, characteristic of pre-human phases of life, with the ultimate product of an exalted and illumined human will ... through the instrumentality of psycho-sexual magic. The Sphinx is the most celebrated image of this concept. ... the meeting of beast and god through the mediumship of man.139
In Lovecraft's stories, these are always considered hideous creations. The Old Ones are gods in their own right, otherwise why do they need a High Priest—Cthulhu—and bands of clandestine worshippers throughout the world to worship and summon them? The offspring of Lavinia Whately then is just such a “meeting of beast and god through the mediumship of man.” And, of course, it was accompanied by “psycho-sexual rites” performed by her wizard father on her tortured mind, her virgin flesh: the incestuous element of the Star Sapphire ritual taken to its heinous, albeit logical, conclusion.
The same process is used—can be used—for widely different ends and by operators of widely different capabilities; but it should be obvious that if such a thing as the Sphinx (for instance) actually existed as a living thing, it would be shunned as an abomination, the ancient Egyptian version of a “Typhonian Teratoma.” Is Cthulhu, then, the product of just such a union? The “animal-headed” masks used by magicians to connect to their atavisms represent stages of human evolution, as per Grant. If so, then the cephalopod-headed creature known as Cthulhu represents a much earlier stage, something predating the arrival of quadripeds and mammals in general. Cthulhu represents that stage in evolution when life was still in its relative infancy: slime-dwelling, ooze-feasting creatures from the ocean's depths. To connect with Cthulhu, then, is to approach the oldest part of the human brain: the reptilian or serpent brain, sitting atop the spinal column, that controls basic “fight or flight” responses as well as ritual, and which is in charge of our sexual responses as well. This has nothing to do with the higher states of love and affection, or of romance and seduction. Rather, this is pure reproductive imperative, pure lust, the seat of the “darkest” passions, those that we—as social beings—attempt (often vainly and with horrendous consequences) to repress, suppress, or flatly deny. It is the realm of what Swiss psychiatrist Carl G. Jung called “the Shadow,” an unconscious element of the personality that is linked to the same animal instincts we have described,140 and which is the repository of a person's darkest desires as well as the source of human creativity141.
If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time.142
It is unnameable, by virtue of the fact that this area of human consciousness existed before there were “individuals”: it is the aspect of consciousness that becomes most pronounced in mob violence, gang rape, and mass hysteria.
Violence carried to the pitch of frenzy, either masochistic or the reverse. This unseals primal atavisms, the resurgence of which leads directly to the most ancient (i.e. the original) state of consciousness which, being pure, is cosmic, unlimited.143
It is the basic building block of survival (fight or flight) and as such it existed before the ego, before the super-ego, before humans became conscious of themselves as separate, individual entities with their own souls, their own spirituality, their own potentialities as kings and queens. The physical aspect of the Shadow—the reptilian brain—is believed to be at least 500 million years old144: certainly a Lovecraftian time span.145 There is nothing thoughtful or intellectual about this characteristic. There is no reasoning with it. There can only be control ... or lack of control. And since logic and reason have no place in the “serpent brain,” until the advent of depth psychology the only means available for controlling its desires and managing its appetites (other than prison or drugs) were in the realm of ritual in which these unholy or unlawful needs found a safe and manageable channel for expression. Otherwise the world would have long since been filled with Typhonian Teratomas as inbreeding and incest would have degenerated the gene pool and resulted in widespread physical and mental deformities.
This part of the brain also controls the autonomic functions, such as heart-rate, breath-rate, peristalis, etc. which are not normally controlled by the conscious mind but which occur automatically, even while we sleep. It is the target of such practices as yoga and Chinese alchemy which seek to exert control over the unconscious mind through manipulation of the autonomic functions. Thus pranayama—one of Crowley's required practices—is the conscious control of breathing, which in turn is the gateway to conscious control of the heart-beat and from there to all the other autonomic functions. It is, of course, an extremely dangerous practice for those who have not been initiated into its secrets by someone who knows what they are doing.
The Necronomicon Gnosis involves the deliberate investigation of this dark realm in its entirety, the realm where death and sexuality (the Freudian “death instinct” and “pleasure principle”) are so inextricably intertwined that it is impossible (from the outside) to tell them apart, but which provides the engine for all successful Thelemic ritual. For Thelema is a doctrine that rejects repression in all its forms and provides outlets—some socially-acceptable, some not—for the exploration and expression of this “dark matter.”
It should be emphasized, however, that Thelema does not provide an excuse for indulging in these antinomian practices willy-nilly, like some kind of occult-oriented swingers club. The only way in which to (productively) access this darker realm, the “Nightside” of Eden, is through the exercise of the Will. The individual—the result of millenia of human evolution—must be in conscious control of its own serpent brain. This is the meeting of beast and god through the mediumship of man spoken of above, the antipodes of human consciousness. The purpose is to assimilate the darker and forbidden aspects of one's consciousness into the higher form of experience, of evolution, so that it may serve as the power-house for greater attainments. In order to do this, the rituals themselves must be accurately timed. There is no better method of controlling the darker impulses than by refusing to allow them expression until “the stars are right.”
When the Stars are Right
The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque, taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely maintained outposts and flew back with vast cargoes of stone to their own stars in the north.
—H. P. Lovecraft146
One of the critical pieces of information concerning the correct position of the “stars”—i.e., when they are “right”—has to do with the Great Bear constellation, referenced above in Lovecraft's story “The Whisperer in the Darkness.” A further note is at the end of that same paragraph when “their own stars in the north” are referenced. Simon has made much of this in his Gates of the Necronomicon, and I have focused on the Great Bear constellation myself in Stairway to Heaven in an attempt to demonstrate its universality among mystery cults in different parts of the world, including shamanism, Mithraism and even some ceremonial forms of Daoism. I believe that this constellation is a key to understanding the ancient cults of which Lovecraft writes and in this it seems Kenneth Grant concurs.
All Circle-craft is based either upon the original (stellar) circle of the Great Bear, Goddess of the Seven Stars; or the Moon and her thirteenfold annual cycle; or on the later and final solar circle of the Twelve Celestial houses of the sun (zodiac).147
The Great Bear is a circumpolar constellation: that is, it never sets below the horizon but rotates endlessly about a point in the absolute north above the earth, represented in our time by the Pole Star. In other words, these are the “stars in the north” to which Lovecraft alludes in his story. Navigators have used the position of the Great Bear constellation—or its smaller asterism, the Big Dipper—to tell time and direction when no landmarks or other astronomical phenomena are available or visible, such as in the middle of the ocean at night. Remembering how critical time and the measurement of time is to the correct performance of rituals intended to evoke planetary and other forces, we can begin to appreciate the relevance of this constellation to mystery religions the world over. Grant associates the Great Bear with the Goddess of the Seven Stars, i.e. with Babalon herself. In the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon, it specifically states that the Gate may be opened when “the Great Bear hangs from its tail in the sky.” Of course, the Great Bear hangs from its tail in the sky once every day as it rotates around the Pole Star (it is actually the earth doing the rotating, as every schoolchild knows). But at night, when the constellation may be visible, it hangs from its tail (making a straight line from the Pole Star) at midnight on April 30.148 As we have noted before, this is a date with great relevance, for it is another of the cross-quarter days mentioned above. Known as Walpurgisnacht to readers of Bram Stoker's Dracula, it is also known as Beltane or even just as May Eve to pagans and Wiccans. The European equivalent of the American Halloween, it is a day when witches gather for their Great Sabbat atop mountain peaks and commune with the Devil ... with the Dark Lord.
It also has some uncanny correspondences with American and world history. For instance, April 30, 1492 was the day Christopher Columbus received his commission to set sail for the East Indies, a voyage that culminated in the “discovery” of America on October 12, 1492—coincidentally Aleister Crowley's birthday.
April 30, 1789 was the day George Washington took the oath of office of President of the United States, on Wall Street in New York City. The monument that bears his name in Washington, D.C. is precisely 555 feet high: 555 is the number of the word Necro-nomicon.
April 30, 1945 is the day when it was alleged that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the Berlin bunker.
April 30, 1975 is the day when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army, signalling the end of the Vietnam War.
April 30, 1978 is the day the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was proclaimed, with disastrous consequences.
And on and on.
Into the north window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light ... The Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “Polaris” (1918)
Lovecraft's conscious employment of the Great Bear and Polaris in his stories may be an indication that he was aware of the role these astronomical entities play in the cults he describes with such terror. Frater Achad—whose strange insistence on a contemporaneous Aeon of Maat we have already described—had this to say about the same constellation:
The first boy and his mother were called Sut-Typhon.
Sut means “The Opener,” and this may be taken in the physiological as well as the astrological sense. The Child was the opener in the sense of being born of the un-mated Mother. The Sun is the Opener of the Day, while Sut as the Star-god was considered the Opener of the Year with the rising of Sothis, and on his rising was the Great Bear cycle founded.149
While Achad links the Great Bear with Set in his writings, Grant does the same in the Typhonian trilogies:
Celestial, not terrestrial, lineage was the matter of contention. In the course of ages, the ancestors of the Terrestrial Typhonians came to be typified by the Great Bear constellation connected with vastly ancient myths inspired by dim memories of the earliest colonisers of earth, and descended from Typhonian star systems.150
Thus we can see that Grant believes that the earliest colonizers of earth came from a region we identify with the Great Bear constellation which is consistent with the Lovecraft short story referenced above, “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” in which alien beings from the Great Bear constellation began coming to earth in aeons past and concerned themselves with mining a specific ore from our planet. Grant is referring in this work to the idea that the type of “lineage” typified by such popular authors as Dan Brown in his DaVinci Code and in other works—fiction and non-fiction—that have come out of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail genre does not refer to an earthly bloodline but to a celestial one (not necessarily a “heavenly” or “divine” bloodline, but one that comes from off-planet). This is a type of lineage that transcends genetics as we understand it and manifests as occult currents through the ages, much in the way that apostolic succession is a “lineage” within the Catholic and Orthodox churches except that, in this case, the lineage to which Grant refers has its origins not on earth or within earthly organizations but in the stars. It is this type of lineage that makes itself known in the works of both Crowley and Lovecraft as we have seen: works produced by these two men, unknown to each other, yet displaying an uncanny pattern of coincidence and agreement. It is what prompted Grant to speak of a Thelemic current as well as a Necronomicon and an Egyptian current, and to identify them as three separate strands of the same lineage.
The Lovecraftian idea that these ancient, extraterrestrial beings came to the earth in order to mine a specific stone has deep resonance with a whole host of concepts connected with alchemy, sexuality, and Tantra, and it is a theme that Lovecraft has explored in more than one short story.
Aside from the oeuvre published under his own name, Love-craft is known to have helped other authors with their stories, in some cases rewriting them entirely but permitting them to be published as original works by the same authors. One particular story reinforces the Grant thesis that Crowley's mysterious “Tulu” and Lovecraft's Cthulhu are one and the same.
This is the story entitled “The Mound” and attributed as the work of Zealia Bishop. It was written in the period 1929-1930 and appears in the collection of Lovecraft's “other” works, The Horror in the Museum, edited by Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi. In this story we have references to “ingots of magnetic Tulu-metal”151 and the “sacred and magnetic Tulu-metal.”152 This story also has a reference to a sunken city, referred to in a Mexican dialect as Relex. Anyone familiar with how the Spanish “x” is pronounced will immediately realize that this word is pronounced “Rel-eh” with a hard “h,” thus giving us a form of R'lyeh.
In this story we have again the theme of mining specific metals, in this case Tulu metal, which is magnetic and therefore of a north-south polarity consistent with the Necronomicon Gnosis and its emphasis on the north-south axis versus the solar east-west axis. It should be pointed out once again that the word “Tulu” is specific to both Lovecraft and to Crowley: it is a point of tangence between the two authors that reflects a deeper connection than we normally attribute to the horror writer and the prophet of the New Age.
Mircea Eliade, the famous historian of religion at the University of Chicago, wrote concerning sacred stones in his The Forge and the Crucible:
It is not very long since the kings of Malaya kept a sacred block of iron which was part of their regalia and surrounded it with an extraordinary veneration mingled with superstitious terror. ...It was not a question of fetishism or of the worship of an object in itself or for its own sake; it was not a matter of superstition but a sacred respect for a strange object outside their own familiar world, an object coming from elsewhere and hence a sign or token of the ’beyond,’ a near-image of the transcendental.153
Eliade equates the practice of mining with a whole host of concepts related to alchemical transformation. The miner was an initiate of the dark mysteries: by working in the caves and hidden places of the earth he was in constant contact with the spirits that dwelled in the underworld. He was also privvy to the secret processes whereby a stone could become gold. He knew where objects were buried and hidden. His day turned into night as he descended into the bowels of the earth, below any visible horizon and thus out of reach of the sun and the stars.
The cult of Mithra conducted its mysterious initiations in caves, in the place of mines and buried treasure, away from the light of the sun. For this reason (and several others), I believe that the Mithraists were not worshipping the Sun god and that the sacred Bull that was slain by Mithra was not an emblem of the zodiacal sign Taurus but of the constellation known as the Great Bear. I develop this theory more carefully in Stairway to Heaven, but basically I identify nocturnal worship with stellar worship, especially in the case of cults and religions that had no other reason to meet in secret since they were not being suppressed or engaging in antinomian practices.
There was an ancient understanding that there was an analogue between the bowels of the earth and the embryonic stages of gestation. The earth gave birth to gold and other precious metals through a long process of metallurgical gestation. The alchemist understood these processes and knew how to hurry them along, to “induce labor” one might say so that the earth gave up its treasures more quickly. The natural process of human evolution may, one day, result in a being of higher intelligence and spiritual illumination; but it is the work of the magician to “induce labor” in the initiate, to hurry along the natural process of spiritual evolution so that it takes place (at least for the individual) in a single lifetime.
This has relevance for the discussion of the reptilian brain, above; for just as human beings evolved over the long term from watery creatures to amphibious mammals to mammals and finally to homo sapiens, so the human embryo goes through a similar process of living in an aqueous solution until it “crawls out onto dry land,” i.e., is born into the world as an air-breathing creature, crawling on all fours and eventually walking upright. In this sense, every magician and every alchemist is an embryo going through the same process as the human embryo, as the metals in the earth, as the entire human race itself. But it must begin by probing the reptilian brain and discovering its contents and neutralizing them, making them servants of the Will. And what better representative of the reptilian brain and the danger and loathesomeness that it conceals than the hideous form of the High Priest of the Great Old Ones, Cthulhu himself?
The Necronomicon Gnosis recognizes that some of the steps along the way were evolutionary dead-ends, at least from the point of view of homo sapiens. While some creatures did not survive and became extinct on our world, the Gnosis insists that not all of them died out permanently but that their scars remain on our DNA, dormant, “dead but dreaming” of the day when they will be “turned on” by environmental or other factors and rise with a roar from the bowels of our own, individual R'lyehs.
The Sunken City
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
—H. P. Lovecraft
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
—C. G. Jung
Lovecraft's core story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” is the repository of all the basic themes and motifs that appear in his later tales. It reflects his basic preoccupations with ancient races, mysterious cults, non-Euclidean geometry, and the power of dreams. It also introduces us to Cthulhu, the high priest of the Great Old Ones, and the sunken city of R'lyeh where Cthulhu lies dead, but dreaming.
The idea of a sunken or buried civilization is something that has been with us for thousands of years. Plato famously referred to the vanished civilization of Atlantis; and rumors of a Lemuria and a Mu—more sunken civilizations—became prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then there was the Hollow Earth theory and the claim that Admiral Byrd had seen the entrance to this “inner earth” through a hole in the vicinity of the North Pole. So the sunken city meme has been a staple of fantasy history for quite some time.
Lovecraft's genius lay in reinterpreting these stories from a darker point of view. Lovecraft's sunken city of R'lyeh is where the Great Old Ones were defeated by some quirk of space or time, and where Cthulhu lies buried in his house-like tomb beneath the waves. This ancient city is older than Atlantis or any of its other mythical counterparts. It was built—using geometry that was all “wrong”—by the race from the stars, a race that used to own the planet Earth in aeons past and which is on the verge of returning when the “stars are right.”
If we analyze this story from the point of view of depth psychology, we can see a certain level of consistency with modern ideas concerning the unconscious and the danger of repressing unconscious feelings and especially the knowledge that lies buried in the deep, forgotten corners of the human mind. In this approach, R'lyeh becomes the unconscious itself, and Cthulhu is the Shadow that waits to be discovered: the potentially dangerous, violent, evil aspect of human nature. An aspect that communicates with us the same way Cthulhu communicates with his followers: in dreams.
Freud famously claimed that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious,” and Lovecraft might have agreed. To the gothic horror writer, dreams were certainly the royal road to R'lyeh, to the dead but dreaming High Priest, Cthulhu. He writes that Cthulhu is in communication with his human followers through a kind of telepathy that manifests in their dreams. This is what triggered the creation of the Cthulhu sculpture by young Wilcox and which sets in motion “The Call of Cthulhu.” We learn that this “call” is indeed the dream-stream sent by Cthulhu from deep within the sunken city, from deep within what Jung called the “collective unconscious.”
It may be a truism that what demands to be known in our dreams is not some beautiful image of heaven or some pleasing, loving memory—but something more sinister, something uglier that needed to be “put down,” that needed to be suppressed in order that the rest of the personality could survive in the real world. The only persons who deliberately evoked those nightmares to visible appearance were the mystics, the magicians, and the shamans. I have written at some length in other works about the shamanistic initiations, and of course Mircea Eliade has discussed this at some length in his seminal work on the subject, Shamanism. This type of initiation involves a direct confrontation with the suppressed psychic material that involves the death, dismemberment, and re-integration of the individual psyche. For someone who has come through this type of experience the dread Cthulhu could hold no fears.
It may also be a truism that this suppressed material is connected with sexual issues. It may involve sexual trauma of the individual at a very young age, or physical or emotional abuse of some kind by an older person. While the exact identity and nature of the trauma will be different from person to person, the Minotaur in the Labyrinth is the same: the different types of abuse reflect different pathways in the Labyrinth, but they all lead to the same Monster at the center. Lovecraft called this Monster by a name he heard or invented or dreamed: Cthulhu.
As described in the Schlangekraft recension of the Necronomicon, the ancient Sumerians had just such a sunken city in their myth cycles. The gate to this underworld palace was through the city of Gudua, the city that became Cutha and Kutu. Cthulhu is Kutu-lu, the Man of the Underworld. He is a hybrid creature, as envisioned by Lovecraft, something crustacean or squid-like. As a High Priest of the Old Ones, he is the liminal figure between humanity and the ancient race from the stars. He lives in the Underworld, in R'lyeh, and can be summoned by those who hear his call through their fevered dreams.
In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft reveals that the rituals required to summon the Great Old Ones involve orgies by people who are of mixed races, the implication being that they are not white Europeans but Arabs, Africans, and Asians ... all races of which Lovecraft was deeply suspicious and fearful. This conflation of unbridled sexuality and exotic races and ethnicities is a common theme in colonialist literature and was a feature in the castigation of the practice of Tantra in India by the British colonizers. Again, Lovecraft has touched on a deep current of occult tradition and methodology in his fantasies, understanding that contact may be made with the darker aspects of the human mind through avenues provided by sexuality. He was not alone in this, of course. The French Decadent poets and authors also made that connection, and the stories of the Black Mass with its worship of Satan combined with sexual orgies are representative of this idea. It was Lovecraft, however, who extended this concept even further by associating the sexual orgies with the worship—not of Satan, or of any human-created or human-inspired boogeyman—but of the most ancient, primordial and non-human race that once controlled the planet and which was on the verge of returning again to reclaim it. Lovecraft wanted to go deeper, darker, into more dangerous territory. He understood that there were levels to human consciousness that could not be plumbed by spiritual dilettantes, and that the rituals employed by sorcerers and magicians had implications far beyond what these individuals believed to be possible ... or desirable. To evoke Cthulhu or any of the Great Old Ones was to invite disaster (from the original meaning of the word, dis-aster or “evil star”) and destruction for the entire planet. It was to cause a mental or nervous breakdown for the entire human race.
At the center of this complex of ideas rests the unholy book itself, the Necronomicon. To Lovecraft, this book contains the spells used by members of the Cthulhu cult and instructions on how to keep the Gate between Us and Them—the ultimate “liminality”—closed forever. The spells are in a language that is unknown, containing diagrams that seem meaningless yet somehow unnerving in their weird geometry. It is a repository of bits and pieces of ancient knowledge—like our dreams, like our own unconscious—and to read it is to become entranced, to enter a dream state while awake, to fear oneself going insane. It is a book of Death, as its name implies, a collection of antique ceremonies and smatterings of images from our collective past. It offers a symbol set that speaks directly to the unconscious, to Cthulhu, in the language Cthulhu uses for communicating to us in our dreams. Instead of Freud's famous Interpretation of Dreams it is a book of dreams that interprets us. It is our collective dreamworld as humans, fragmentary and filled with lacunae as it may be, a satanic semiotics that offers a two-lane pathway to our darkest memories as a race of humans and of our contact—at some distant, immemorial past—with another race of being, a contact that was perhaps not quite so pleasant as we may wish to believe. It enables us to interpret and decipher our dreams (the messages from Cthulhu) but also provides a means for communicating back. As Grant understood, the Necronomicon is also a manual not only of dream interpretation (a la Freud) but of dream control.
It's how we communicate with the denizens of the sunken city, whether we call it R'lyeh or the collective unconscious. And it uses the fiber optic cable of the serpent brain to transfer its bits and ... “bites.”
128 H.P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”
129 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
130 And, conversely, liberation theology with anti-ecclesiastical movements, but that is another story for another time.
131 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu.”
132 Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time, London: Frederick Muller, 1980, p. 14
133 Kenneth Grant, Outer Gateways, London: SKOOB, 1994, p. 149
134 Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden, London: SKOOB, 1994, Chapter Six “Typhonian Teratomas.”
135 This is possibly a reference to the ancient Babylonian concept of the lilitu: demons of the night.
136 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror.”
137 From the Memorandum of The Surrealist Revolution, 1925.
138 That this might have been a veiled or even unconscious allusion on Lovecraft's part to incest has not escaped the author, of course. Yet, as we have seen, allusions to incest are integral to the Star Sapphire Ritual that Crowley wrote under intense spiritual stress and these two eruptions of incest symbolism may be related to the subject under discussion.
139 Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, pp. 15-16.
140 C.G. Jung “Answer to Job” in his Collected Works, Volume 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East.
141 C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1983, London, p. 262.
142 H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time.”
143 Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, pp. 97-98. In this section he references violence as only one way among many to arouse Kundalini.
144 See the pioneering work of Paul MacLean—the discoverer of the reptilian brain—in this regard.
145 See, for instance, this from Lovercraft's “The Shadow Out of Time”: “According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universe and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million year ago.” Thus, our reptilian brains and this “horrible elder race” are contemporaneous, if not consanguinous!
146 H. P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in the Darkness”
147 Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, p. 122
148 Due to the precession of the equinoxes, the hour has shifted slightly from year to year. See Simon's Gates of the Necronomicon for specific dates and times.
149 Frater Achad, The Egyptian Revival, p. 2. It should be noted that “Sut” is Achad's rendering of “Set,” the Dark Lord.
150 Kenneth Grant, Outer Gateways, p. 35
151 Zealia Bishop, “The Mound” in The Horror In The Museum, edited by S.T. Joshi, Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, WI, 1989, p. 135.
152 Ibid., p. 151
153 Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, p. 27. The author can attest that blocks of sacred stone—surrounded by iron fences to keep the profane at a distance—are still in evidence in the Archipelago.